When most people think about modern feminism, the last thing they’d ever associate it with is the sex industry. They’re pretty much polar opposites, at least on the surface. The latter is accused of embodying every hardship and patriarchal nuisance that the former stands against. But as with all such movements, there is a dissension of opinion about the sex industry, and about escorts in particular.

A Changing Society

OK, to start, let’s think about what a feminist is. For most guys, they’re idea of a feminist is pretty much restricted to butch-looking lesbians with bald cuts. Any interpretation of them usually relies on the precept that they’re anti-men, largely because no man in his right mind would go anywhere near them. In some cases, this is undoubtedly true, but that’s just incidental. We’re living in the age of woman’s rights, and so we should be. Every other day we hear something about women’s equality – in the work place, on the film set and at home.

But for the sake of ease, we’ll acknowledge modern feminism as the belief that women deserve equal rights and opportunities to men. And this is where a lot of the distortion of opinion exists. For a lot of women, what the sex industry represents is a prison, where the cells are dark and dingy motel rooms and man is the jailer. This is partly based on the perception the industry is a male-centric sphere. It’s true that the majority of porn actors are female, but this is an effect of higher demand, not because men have enslaved an army of naïve girls. To ignore this would be to overlook the sheer number of male escorts and porn stars, simply because it doesn’t into this narrow-minded narrative.

So essentially, at least for us, this side of the feminist view is based on a misunderstanding of causality within the industry. Too often it is seen as a fundamentally exploitative and degrading environment, where the larger percentage of women is based on the inequality between genders. Woman is slave to the whim of man, and the effect (or consequence) of this imbalance is to be subjected to the industry.

A Lack of Choice

The contention is that this side of feminism does exactly to women’s rights what they’re fighting against; it slowly erodes and damages the core idea of equality it implies a woman is unable to make a choice. They victimise and criminalise women and their behaviour. They negate the impact of choice, of liberal-minded attitudes and of believing that a woman has the right to do what she wishes with her body without fearing social prejudice or reprisal.

And that’s where the other side of the feminists belong; the group that doesn’t see being feminist and working in the sex industry as mutually exclusive. Male power doesn’t always have to be sexualized, and neither does female’s choice to be part of an industry.

The sex industry does not defeat the idea of equality in feminism, it empowers it. The more activist groups seek to criminalise sex, the more they strip women of their voice and their rights. At the end of the day, their choices will always be the same.